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Comment by odiroot | Hacker News Reader

When I lived in Germany, I used a local (private) practice for my immediate needs. This was covered by my statutory (yet still private) insurance from a Krankenkasse. I usually could get a next week appointment or wait in the queue 2-3h and see my doctor on the same day. You can go for commercial insurance (which they actually call private) and cut these times.

Now, living in England and using the (fully public) NHS, I can't even get a GP appointment in the next 4 weeks. And the surgery mostly gives you only telephone appointment. And no, you cannot just walk in and wait to see a doctor. Appointments only. This is not even only my surgery's problem.

The waiting time for specialist doctors are even more ridiculous.

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The level of service you recall from Germany was common in the U.K. until a few years ago, or certainly ten years ago this was my experience in every practice area I lived.

GP practices are all private in the U.K., the visits are only paid for by the NHS. Precisely why GP wait times have gotten so bad I can’t say, but the real-terms funding cuts the NHS has experienced over the past decade likely contribute.

Of course, you can top up with private care in the U.K. also, and this seems to be becoming increasingly common.

Hasn't Britain been having mass immigration?

I thought it was the opposite, people leaving due to brexit

Germany does also have clearly higher healthcare costs per capita, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea....

Though as far as I understand Germany also has an older population which explains part of it. But in any case the German system isn't exactly cheap.

Then you can very much see it with your own eyes! Thanks for the link.

One thing to consider is that the NHS is a centralised and socialised system (barring the NHS internal market, which is in the process of abolition), whereas the German system has mandatory but private insurance which would involve more administrative costs, not to mention money spent on marketing and the like, so the costs are not directly comparable, and in general Germany probably spends more of the money on non-medical services.

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